Post-phenomenology

This talk explores the connections between design and phenomenological philosophy. The goal is to give the audience a better sense of how philosophical movements have affected everyday design, from UX to interaction design to design thinking. This presentation was the first culmination of research for my book by the same name.

Radical, ‘eventful’ bodily vulnerability has yet to receive sustained attention in contemporary human geography. As one way of addressing the implications of existential vulnerability, this thesis explores the social geographies of people living with epilepsy. It draws upon multiple-methods research comprising an extensive mixed-methods questionnaire and semi-structured interviews, all conducted with people with epilepsy who are members of the charity, Epilepsy Scotland, the project partner. By paying attention to the (post-)phenomenological experience of ‘seizures’, the thesis argues that a failure to appreciate the complex and often extremely troubling spatialities of epileptic episodes invariably results in sustaining the stigmatisation of epilepsy and the partial views of ‘outsiders’. By exploring changed, changing and changeable relations between self, body, space, time and others, the thesis suggests that spatial behaviours in and across different places shift according to various biographical, social and illness experiences and contexts. More specifically, it contends that certain spaces become risky some or all of the time because of the body that not only threatens personal disorientation but also the very foundations of the social order. While there is a corresponding risk that individuals with epilepsy will confine themselves within the socially (although not materially) contained homeplace, many adopt active and resourceful practices, taking into account immediate time-space and embodied knowledges so as to resist being told what they can do, where and when. Disciplining the ‘epileptic body’ and environment to accommodate the unpredictability of seizures are put forward as a challenging case study for thinking through how the vital vulnerabilities of everyday life are made sense of through the very governmental regimes that they will always escape.

My attempt in this paper is to illustrate some of the major developments in current phenomenological aesthetic research in the field of Atmospheres, showing how this concept has first consolidated through phenomenological approaches and has then concretized in the context of contemporary architecture. A main issue in this regard is the theoretical-philosophical basis on which the new contexts of this project are based and are therefore marked by a sensitive and perceptive approach toward the inhabited space. Through the concepts of experience, sensitive perception , and predisposition to places I will investigate how Atmospheres today represent an aesthetic way to interpret not only the inhabited space, but also the architectural project in modern and contemporary architecture.

Can an artifact of information technology be considered an extension of the human?

A post-phenomenological study considering the embodiment of smart phones as an extension of the human self using cyborg anthropology and embodiment relations.

Computer games contribute to their players' emotions in diverse ways, ranging from sheer exhilaration to anger and disillusion. Our ability to enjoy computer game play that involves genuine intense emotions which in other contexts would be easily
deemed as "negative" suggests that there is something in the ways in which we make sense of computer games that separates gameplay from other activities we engage in. Focusing single player computer games and situating within the emerging field of computer game studies, this dissertation starts from the assumption that emotions are always already intertwined with the experience of play and proceeds to describe, not any idiosyncratic emotional experience, but the means by which games can ensure their contents to be involved in players' emotions.

Emotions are taken as intentional, as always about something. From this premise follows that to understand an emotion it is necessary to understand the reasons the subject has for relating to the object of the emotion in the particular way. Building on game studies, existential phenomenology, and philosophy of technology, this dissertation postulates a first person perspective from which to describe solitary computer game play and the emotions it involves in terms of their experienced signicance. From describing the freedoms and responsibilities imposed by the materiality of the computer game artefact on its voluntary player, the gameplay condition emerges as an intersubjective baseline for the players' judgements about events, objects, and states of aairs in the game, potentially surfacing as emotions.

Rather than being explained in terms of their rules, computer games appear as technological artefacts which simultaneously extend the concrete limitations against which their human players are free to realize their projects, and shape the ways in which human mind can be directed at aspects of the world. However, this can go on only as long as long as the player fulfills the requirements of which the gameplay condition comprises. Based on this condition, game artefacts can be described as standing out from among all other technological artefacts which co-shape human intentionality. By the conduct of emotional investment, the dissertation describes how voluntary players can end up experiencing emotions about aspects which would most likely seem trivial from a non-player's perspective.

Finally, the dissertation postulates an experiential ontology of computer game content, distinguishing between game content that is undeniable: crucial in terms of fullling the gameplay condition, and deniable: game content whose taking seriously is mostly voluntary. Thus, undeniable game content can be safely assumed as being involved in the emotions' of all players.

Ship of Theseus (Gandhi, 2013) an experimental film, presents an intriguing narrative of human and technology relations involving three characters namely Aaliya, who is a visually differently abled woman photographer, Maitreya, a monk diagnosed with liver cirrhosis and fighting against testing animals for drug validation, and that of Navin, a stockbroker, who after receiving kidney transplantation set out to help a poor man to get back his stolen kidney. This study examines the human-technology relations between Aaliya and her passion for photography that she took up after she lost the cornea in both her eyes. The film narrates the post-abnormal phase in her life and how she engages with the world without eyesight. However, regaining her eyesight following cornea transplantation, affords a different experience engaging with photography wherein she realizes that visuality squashes her ingenuity. The ocular-centric visual regime surrounding photography disables her from clicking pictures. Her feeling and sensing the world through technology is dictated by seeing unlike her embodied relations she experienced before her surgery. Analysed through the theoretical frameworks of phenomenology and post-phenomenology, this paper found out that, prior to 2 regaining eyesight, Aaliya embodied camera and concomitant technologies to make sense of the world. Her embodiment of photo editing software, video chat with her mother online and other technological material objects anchored her sense of being. While Aaliya is caught in a tension between her embodied relations with technologies during the moments when she was visually differently abled and later when she regains eyesight, she comes across as a post-human establishing an intercorporeal relationship between Aaliya and technologies she uses in the film. Besides, her differently abled body represents a cyborgian body challenging the corporeal fetishism humanistic approaches advance.

In this paper I will discuss, by building on post-phenomenological philosophy of technology, existential ludology, and game studies, the conditions of possibility for discovery in computer games and present a sketch for a model of three 'levels of discovery' in computer games: discovery of that which we can do, of that which we need to do, and, of what we want to do.

This paper introduces a phenomenological understanding of in- formation as it relates to technology use. Phenomenology is more commonly applied to the understanding of “things”—or the relationship be- tween things, experience, and cognition—than it is to information studies, but there is much that phenomenological philosophy can contribute to understanding the interactions between humans and information. This paper will focus on how classical and contemporary phenomenological ideas influence our understanding of information, ultimately suggesting a deeper understanding of praxis-based organization and design.

Contemporary videogames make use of a diverse array of physical and graphical user interfaces (GUIs) with diverse mechanics and logics (Jorgensenn, 2013). As these new interfaces beckon, one might well wonder if we are still phenomenally limited, as Thomas Nagel (1974) once argued, to the 'resources' of our own minds. This chapter proposes that scholarship consider seriously how videogame aesthetics can articulate novel kinds of sense-perception at the edges of ludic and narrative experiences, and in forms distinct from previous scholarship concerned with experiential implications of VR (Helsel and Roth, 1991) or the phenomenology of physical interfaces (Keogh, 2018). Through a post-phenomenological understanding of atmospheres as ‘quasi-objective’ aesthetic objects (Griffero 2017; B hme, 2017) I argue that videogames offer us cyborg access to alien forms of experience, as well as new defamiliarized perspectives on human sensation.

This is artist Yvonne Dröge Wendel's reflection about objects, about how we downplay their importance while in fact we depand on them entirely. Though there is no reference in her work to philosophy, this reflection- in exactly these terms- might also have been made by a contemporary philosopher - especially one influenced by the work of Bruno Latour and his colleagues. Though Dröge Wendel never met Latour, like him, she has struggled for the length of her career with a specific failure of our modern language and concepts: the failure to recognise the exact nature of our relationship to objects

This book is based on the intersection of design thinking and human experience. It draws from philosophy, psychology, object studies, and design theory. Dasein is a German word commonly translated as "being-there." Philosophers have used this word to describe human experience as situated in contexts and environments, ultimately arguing that we cannot separate the human existence from his or her context.

When designers talk about related fields, they often mention anthropology, cognitive science, psychology, information science, etc., but philosophy is usually left out. Why? Why don’t we talk about philosophy as a contributor to the understanding of design, especially when phenomenology, the philosophical study of human experience, has contributed so much to our understanding of the interrelation between humans and technology?

Design for Dasein attempts to apply phenomenological thinking to design in order to further inform what designers (especially what we might call "experience designers") do in their day to day work. Many activities designers perform every day can be traced back to insights from phenomenology. Activities like user testing, prototyping, sketching, interaction models, personas, interviewing, ethnography, participatory design, and processes like design thinking and lean UX all have phenomenological roots. The book will highlight these connections and explore how they contribute to designing better experiences, providing the reader with new ways of thinking about his or her work, and new strategies for designing systems for both present and future scenarios.